He fisted my phone and held up both arms to sidle around me and move past the bed. “Just one sec...”
He was... leaving the room?
“Hold up. Where are you going with that?” I asked as he headed out the door, pocketing my phone. “Wait! What—”
I raced to the door, but he slammed it in my face.
The lock snicked.
“You just stay put for a little while,” he told me through the door. “I promise nothing will happen to you. But I need to make some calls. Then we’ll talk again. Sorry, Paige, but I’ve got a feeling you’re keeping something from me.”
“Fuck you, you maniac! Let me out!” I rattled the handle, but it was no use. “You can’t do this!”
But I supposed he could whatever he wanted in his own house.
And what he wanted, by all appearances, was to kidnap his own daughter.
Chapter 28
I raged at the door, screaming for help. Someone had to hear me. I’d seen that housekeeper downstairs, Ester. Surely, he had to have other staff. Gardeners, pool boys... When I stopped screaming, I heard raised voices—downstairs?Was he talking to Ester? I couldn’t tell, and after the voices quieted for a long time, I resumed screaming. When I paused to listen again, I heard nothing.
“Dammit!” I kicked the door in frustration and tried to calm down so I could think. My father had taken my phone, so I couldn’t call Seb. He’d be worried about me when he got off work, if he wasn’t already, judging by that last text he sent. Worried and pissed as hell, probably. Hard to blame him. This was shaping up to be one of the dumbest things I’d ever done, coming out here alone.
Then again, no one expects to be kidnapped.
Maybe Ishouldhave.
“Is this about the Golden Venus?” I finally called out with a hoarse voice, heart racing.
No response. Could he even hear me up here? I was all the way at the end of the upstairs hall. After a while, I gave up at the door and tried across the room, where the French doors led out to the balcony. Locked, naturally, but not one I could just flip open.There was a keyhole.Who locks their damn balcony with a key?Was this a rich-people thing I didn’t know about, or had he locked other people in this room?
“Help!” I banged on the glass and looked outside. The neighbors weren’t visible; trees surrounded the property right up to the edge of Reeds Lake. Even if I could open the door, it was too far above the ground. I’d probably break both my legs on the concrete that surrounded the pool. Only thing I could do was call for help. Someone had to hear eventually. We were in a residential neighborhood, for the love of God!
Maybe I could find something in the room to help me escape. A key to the balcony or a screwdriver. Something! But the room was devoid of humanity. The bedside tables had no drawers. The only thing that did was a bureau, but it was empty. Nothing in the closet but an extra pillow. But when I bent to look under the bed, I heard a voice coming from inside the heating vent in the nearby wall.
I put my ear next to the vent and strained to hear.
“—up your phone when I call, got it? Just shut up and listen to me. We’ve got a change of plans. I’ve got her here. Well, that’s your problem, now, isn’t it?”
Who was my father talking to? He went quiet, listening to the person on the other end of the phone. I waited for him to speak again.
“Fine, I don’t care, but I’m not bringing her to that cesspit you call a compound.”
Holy mother of God, it was Big Burg.Panic surged inside my chest.
“Just send Paul back out here,” my father’s voice said from inside the vent. “But he can’t park that truck in my drive. Draws toomuch attention. Tell him to park it down the street. I’ll leave the gate open for him.”
He must’ve hung up because I heard nothing else, even after I camped out on the floor and waited to see if he made any other calls but it was silent.
None of this was good. Now I worried my father might be planning to hand me off to Paul, a prospect that made my stomach sick. I tried to consider less-awful hypotheticals that might play out but just couldn’t see how my father would let me go without some assurance I wouldn’t head straight to the police.
No possible scenario would end with him handing me back my phone and opening the front door. This wasn’t anOops, my badsituation. It was a felony. And I didn’t know enough about the true nature of my father’s character to make assumptions about his reasoning. All I knew was that he’d manipulated legal loopholes to rob my family blind, and when it came to him accepting guardianship of me, his only child, he’d tossed me aside like a broken doll.
What else would he do?
What else had he done already?
I emptied my purse onto the bed, searching for something to pick a lock. Granted, I had no ideahowto, but if I stuck something small inside the keyhole for long enough, maybe I’d get lucky. While I was searching, a knock on the door made me jump and scatter my things.
